Potatoes [an update]

About 2 months ago I start my Potato Bucket Project.  I used six 5-gallon buckets from Lowes and this tutorial. 

I followed the directions like a good little gardener but I wasn’t seeing what I was s’pposed to be seein’.  Disconcerting to say the least.

Well, I had a bit of a hiccup with the whole potatoes thing.  [APPARENTLY] I did not allow the seed potatoes to sufficiently sprout before planting.  So, while I’m spending my days carefully watering and being sure the buckets got lots of sun, the potatoes were just…..s l o w l y…..rotting away.  I discovered this as dug down through the mulch to figure out why it I hadn’t seen the “promised” sprouts coming through the soil and it had been like 3 weeks.  Side note: rotting seed potatoes are nasty.  So I had some extra seed potatoes (which I had ordered from Seed Savers Exchange) and went and put them in a brown paper sack and stuck them in the closet for about a week and that seemed to do the trick!  I ended up with some real good sprouts and put them in the buckets (slightly shallower than the 4” I did for the first round).  So in a week or two I finally saw this:

I piled up some more mulch on top of the plants today.  That way the buried parts of the stems form roots and I gets me more po-ta-toes!  That’s the whole point, right?  I may do the next round of mulch piling using the FREE STRAW I got a couple months ago.  Will update later…

Free Bale of [STRAW]

We went to a birthday party for our friend’s daughter a few weekends ago; a cowgirl-themed party.  At the end of the party my friend asked me if I wanted to have the straw bale they had purchased for decoration.  SCORE!!!  How often does a question like that get asked and result in pure joy to other person?!  Luckily, my wife let me load it in ‘her’ van to take home, which of course resulted in a mess of straw all over the back area that I, of course, promised to clean up that day but took me two weeks to get to.

The straw has come in really handy!  I am getting ready to grow some fingerling potatoes in 5-gallon buckets (using this tutorial).  I didn’t have any gravel to put in the bottom of the buckets to help with drainage so I used a couple inches of straw. 

I also used the straw as a nice mulch for the pathways in between the beds in my garden, which looks WAY better than before.  Also, it will keep the weeds down and make it easier to walk around after it rains (which, of course, we won’t get anymore of because I put the straw down).